The Switchboard War

The next American city to host self-driving taxis will answer a quieter question: who owns the switchboard between rider and car. Once the car drives itself, the hard part stops being the vehicle and becomes the dispatch — the layer that knows where the rider is, where the car is, and who pays whom. Whoever owns that layer owns the rest of the market, because nobody builds a second app when the first is the city-mandated default.

That is the structure behind Uber's ask this week: Javi Correoso, head of U.S. policy and federal affairs, told the D.C. Council — the city legislature — that any self-driving taxi in the District should also offer human-driven rides through the same app. Uber calls it a hybrid service; in practice it is a routing mandate — the autonomous vehicle runs, but it dispatches through Uber. Waymo is backing Charles Allen's B26-0684, which would let self-driving taxis run on a first-party basis, on the operator's own service, and frames the hybrid ask as protectionism.

The labor figure Uber keeps citing — one autonomous vehicle displaces roughly four for-hire drivers, who pick up passengers through apps like Uber and Lyft — is doing rhetorical work the underlying data may not support. Take it as Uber's claim, not a settled result, and the question stays: in an AV-dominant city, is the routing layer a regulated utility, or a product the operator of the cars gets to keep. Mayor Bowser leaves office in January, and Monday's hearing is the only 2026 venue where the answer goes on the record.